ParkPing

Inspiration

• I commute to work every day, mostly by car. Finding a parking spot is time-consuming, stressful, and expensive.
• I live near an office and work outside of city centre. I leave home around 6 and arrive around 17h, someone could take my parking spot and i could earn money for it. -Make small money every day while making environment greener and making people happy by saving their time

What it does

The Application does help commuters find the vacant parking spots, placed up by commuters like them. The Application is aided by an IOT device, making the garage of a customer smarter. The device keeps track of when the garage is free and interacts over the internet to notify the changes it have. The device makes the garage intelligent to support multiple commuters park their vehicles 1 after the other, as it makes the parking vacancy available in the map till the time the owner is coming back.

How we built it

We built it with pain and pleasure. The time pressure did not allow quality work but we enjoyed every part of it! We created mobile-friendly single page app, which servers as the frontend. It is JavaScript heavy application which communicates with our api and talks with a live data service, called pubnub. Our api is restful, built on top of node.js, express.js with functionally tested core controllers. Our data is stored in MySQL. Approving a parking space requires human interaction, should not be done automatically. Every listing creates a user story in a specified project in TargetProcess so an authorised company, person can approve it. After approval, our system with the help of an IOT device, marks the spot as available and it is visible, searchable by our visitors and editable by its owner. Owners can add schedules so our system can hide or show their listed items.

We identify the spots by an IOT device which is shipped after approving a parking place. This device communicates with our api, checks position, marks spots as available or booked whenever an authorised vehicle takes it.

Challenges we ran into

working with Various API's including Here Maps, working with a system having pubnub and Docker

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning!! We barely slept. We almost have a production-ready application.

What we learned

Got to know that we should come prepared well for a Hackathon, and we should have a ui specialist with us. Also two people were not enough to fulfil our needs and we should have looked for more teammates. Learned about working with Here map API, TargetProcess API, Edison.

What's next for ParkPing

As this Idea is unique, and has a potential to add up millions of new parking spaces, most of them for a short duration of time. I would like to complete the application and pitch the Idea to Investors, we already have a running app(with some gaps).

Built With

• docker
• here-map
• iot
• javascript
• node.js
• pubnub